Call of Duty: Modern Warfare marked the last big innovation for the online shooter. Although a progression system in an FPS wasn’t new (PlanetSide had done it years earlier.), credit Infinity Ward for popularizing it. Now, a leveling system is… Continue Reading →

]]>Call of Duty: Modern Warfare marked the last big innovation for the online shooter. Although a progression system in an FPS wasn't new (PlanetSide had done it years earlier.), credit Infinity Ward for popularizing it. Now, a leveling system is no longer an exception to the rule for online multiplayer modes; it's expected.
Now, it's commonplace and can be seen in anything from Front Mission Evolved to Dead Space 2. To impress gamers nowadays, developers have to offer something truly novel and Kaos Studios, the makers of Frontlines: Fuel of War, could do just that with their latest project.
With Homefront'smultiplayer mode, Kaos introduces intense large-scale warfare via vehicles and map size, on-the-fly strategic choices and an evolving battlefield. Those sound like broad and abstract features, but when it comes down to it, the big twist that Kaos Studios has up its sleeves is Battle Points. It's a match-to-match economy system and amazingly it works.
The team introduces a resource that players have to manage. A gamer can earn it for capturing objectives or marking targets using an aerial drone. He can earn points for getting revenge kills or saving a partner. Once he has enough Battle Points, a player can purchase a number of things depending on what he chose for his loadout. A gamer can buy simple things like the aforementioned drones, which he can use to spot enemies so that others on his team can take them out. He can even buy heavy weapons like rocket launcher.
"We wanted to employ a mechanic, where you didn't have to die to counter a vehicle," said Jeremy Greiner, Kaos Studios community manager.
How does that work? Well, if you think about how games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 play, it's a game changer. Say you were an assault trooper and ran into a tank. Of course, your small arms would be useless against it. You'd have to look for a rocket launcher to do any damage or die so you can switch classes and respawn. It's a hassle. You not only have to start over, but you have to drive halfway across the map to kill the tank that just killed you.
With Battle Points, if players are in that same situation, they could buy a rocket launcher on the fly and blast the hell out of the tank. No dying. No traveling across the map. It nearly evens the playing field while posing a challenge to both sides. The assault trooper has to conserve Battle Points and earn the rocket launcher if they wish to purchase it. If they spend their points like a drunken sailor, they could be out of luck. It adds a spend and save philosophy to the gameplay that players will have to adjust to.
Looking at it from the tank drivers perspective, they deserve the advantage of armor. That's because again players have to earn Battle Points and buy vehicles, too. The good thing is that once they buy one, they spawn into them and they can immediately get into combat. There's no trudging a virtual miles to get to a jeep and then driving that jeep into fracas.
"In vehicular games, players usually camp the tank," Greiner said. "And when a vehicle is lost, there's no value. With the Battle Point system, players spawn into the vehicle and keeps players in the action."
Of course, Kaos Studios is still balancing this system. When I was playing, getting a tank was fairly easy midway through a battle, and once players do have a Battle Points advantage, it gets harder for the other team to come back. In addition, there will be a cap to the amount of certain vehicles for each map. Don't expect a team to earn enough points for Apache choppers and then send a squadron of them to dominate the map. In fact, the game monitors what's on the field, and in the future builds, it could adjust prices of vehicles and weapons to help counter what a rival team has out there.
The multiplayer mode usually follows a flow like this: Both teams attack each other on foot. It's hectic as both sides vie for control points. There's going to be lots of camping as players lie prone and wait for unsuspecting enemies to wander through their areas. It's very easy to die and it's one of the reasons drones are one of the earliest items you can buy with Battle Points. Aerial drones can scan for enemies overhead, warning allies of danger, or the ground drones can check out an area for campers before you enter.
Eventually, players will earn enough Battle Points for vehicles. It starts out with something like an APC or a turreted jeep but soon escalates to choppers and tanks. The scale grows larger as both teams fight over control points and the map shifts. There's more explosions, more dying. The people who have the armor tend to dominate the map unless someone throws a couple of EMP grenades at them, disabling a tank and blasting it with rockets. (That's very doable without having to die.)
What's impressive is that everything in battle has a purpose. There doesn't seem to be any wasted weapons among the games pre-built loadouts such as a heavy, a stealth and an assault soldier. Of course, you can build your own class as you level up your character and customize him with weapons, perks and planned Battle Point purchases. Neither the Koreans nor the Americans have a distinct advantage, but expect to see some futuristic weapons in the arsenal. The multiplayer mode takes place in 2025, which is two years before the single-player campaign.
Lastly, when it comes to the maps, they're expansive thanks to the Ground Control rule set we played with. In this mode, players initially fight over three spots in the center of the map -- it can be a gas station, boarded up home or a church. At a certain time or at a certain point total, the map switches. The team that won the center advances toward enemy territory and they'll have to defend it. If the rivals win, the players will be on their heels and fall back to their part of the map.
It definitely adds variety as the goals switch midmatch and it pushes players to new territory. It also breaks up the terrain because usually the different zones have differing structures and general layout. A small farm may be at the map center, but then the battle may go to the industrial part of a farm across a river. Instead of barns and farmhouses, players will be firing at each other through grain silos and manufacturing equipment. The changing battlefield prevents a visual fatigue and it forces teams to change strategy.
The reason that Kaos Studios can do all this is that they're going to have dedicated servers. It makes the games more fair because the host won't have the advantage and it allows the team do more things with the aforementioned systems.
From the looks of it, Homefront's multiplayer could start a trend. Players could be seeing its Battle Points system being adopted by other games. It fixes a lot of things that are annoying with vehicles in shooters, and at the same time, it adds a breath of fresh air to the online game. But don't take my word for it, gamers can get their hands on the game when it's scheduled for release next year.
]]>http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/10/08/homefront-multiplayer-takes-genre-a-step-in-right-direction/feed/7Homefront MultiplayerHomefront MultiplayerHomefront MultiplayerHomefront MultiplayerHomefront MultiplayerHomefront ups intensity with drama, story that hits close to heartlandhttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/06/21/homefront-ups-intensity-with-drama-story-that-hits-close-to-heartland/
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/06/21/homefront-ups-intensity-with-drama-story-that-hits-close-to-heartland/#commentsMon, 21 Jun 2010 21:59:25 +0000Gieson Cachohttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/?p=18904

One of the most harrowing things about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the premise. It imagines a war between the United States and Russia, in which the battle isn’t abroad, it erupts in suburbia. It connects the fighting… Continue Reading →

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One of the most harrowing things about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the premise. It imagines a war between the United States and Russia, in which the battle isn't abroad, it erupts in suburbia. It connects the fighting we see on TV to the touchstones of American life -- the strip malls, the fast food joints, the two-story houses on cul-de-sacs. It's a scenario that's both fascinating and unsettling to play through.
And Kaos Studios knows this, taking that concept and expanding on it. In its vision of the future called Homefront, Kim Jong-Il's son unites the Korean peninsula and the resulting superpower takes over the Far East. Meanwhile, the United States faces oil shortages and the collapse of its financial system. This opens the door for a Korean invasion. A Korean EMP blast takes out the electrical grid and the Asian nation overruns Hawaii and then San Francisco. Although it's highly unlikely that will happen in 2024, it does set up a compelling environment for a shooter.
Players take on the role of a modern-day American freedom fighter. After surviving a brutal firefight and sleeping 14 hours, the player wake up to this upside-down world. The resistance has set up a base among a cluster of old homes. Everything is fenced off. There's camouflage in the tree tops to hide their presence. Everything is off the grid. The whole set up screams hippie commune, but it also shows American ingenuity in the face of great adversity.
One of the fighters creates a makeshift water pump out of a stairclimber. Another cooks and stores pasta sauce made from tomatoes in a backyard garden. Amid this facility, players learn that the Midwest has become a radiation zone, and that the military has scattered. If the game reminds players of Red Dawn, it should. John Milius, who worked on that war movie and Apocalypse Now, wrote the script. There's a rawness about this alternate future, and that came through in the next part of the demo that design director David Votypka showed.
The goal of Homefront, he said, was to create drama and these immersive moments. In this mission, players go with a team of freedom fighters to a Lumber Liquadators that has been taken over by the Koreans. Players ambush guards atop a nearby building in the parking lot. For the most part, it looks like a conventional first-person shooter. Players appear to just point, shoot and infilitrate the base.
Over the radio, I heard the plan the U.S. team was going to execute. These fighters would create a diversion with a car. At first, I thought they would send a car bomb into the Korean base, but they didn't. It'd be strange juxtaposition using a tactic that we associate with terrorists to American resistance fighters trying to battle the Koreans. Kaos Studios didn't go so far. Instead, the car was tagged with a tracking device that drew a barrage of missiles to the site.
In a flash, everything exploded into fire and the ramshackle building that the player and his partner were resting on collapses. They had to wade through the flames and continue the attack. It gets pretty crazy from here. The intensity of the battle picks up, and players realize that the people they're fighting with aren't soldiers, they're civilians. Some of them are freaking out or just standing there, not used to seeing people being barbecued in the middle of a battlefield.
That little touch humanizes friend and foe alike. Empathy is something you don't see in most shooters. The assault goes on and players see some new types of vehicles like a stumpy tank called a Goliath and an attack chopper. Despite being in the future, the weapons seem fairly conventional. There aren't any stealth suits or exoskeletons as in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier.
What players do have is a story-driven shooter that's set in the West for the most part. Chris Cross, lead designer, said that players will start in Montrose, Colorado, and move west toward San Francisco. That's the direction the plot takes. Why Montrose? I asked him. He said that it was the perfect distance from mountains to the coast that the team wanted to take the story. Will we see firefights in San Francisco? Every indication on the the game's website suggests so.
Meanwhile, Votypka did mention that Homefront will feature a multiplayer mode. That's expected coming from the developer who made Frontlines: Fuel of War. But he didn't say much more on that. The game itself is scheduled for release Feb. 22, 2011.]]>http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/06/21/homefront-ups-intensity-with-drama-story-that-hits-close-to-heartland/feed/29HomefrontHomefrontHomefrontHomefrontHomefrontE3 2010 Day 2 in pictureshttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/06/17/e3-2010-day-2-in-pictures/
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/06/17/e3-2010-day-2-in-pictures/#commentsThu, 17 Jun 2010 07:21:20 +0000Gieson Cachohttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/?p=18878

Sorry this is late but Tuesdays is one of probably the hardest day of the expo with the early start with the Nintendo conference (They announced a new Kid Icarus and the Nintendo 3DS!), Sony’s media event (Twisted Metal on… Continue Reading →

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Sorry this is late but Tuesdays is one of probably the hardest day of the expo with the early start with the Nintendo conference (They announced a new Kid Icarus and the Nintendo 3DS!), Sony's media event (Twisted Metal on PS3), the floor opening later in the day (a surprising showing by THQ) and the parties at night. Here's what I saw throughout the day.
Kevin Butler
]]>http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/06/17/e3-2010-day-2-in-pictures/feed/16Nintendo 3DSNintendo 3DSNintendo 3DSMetroid Other MDonkey Kong Country ReturnKirby's Epic YarnSony E3 News conference 2010Sony E3 News Conference 2010Sony E3 News Conference 2010Twisted Metal PS3Twisted Metal PS3E3 2010 Halo Reach displayE3 2010 Red Faction ArmageddonE3 2010 Vanquish suitE3 2010E3 2010 Def Jam RapstarE3 2010